When you think biotech in Wisconsin, you think Madison. But Thursday night, a Milwaukee-based biotech start-up emerged as the winner of the third annual Governor’s Business Plan contest.
MatriLab is a 2-year-old company that has no revenue and is trying to raise $250,000 from angel investors. MatriLab’s technology is based on research by John Kao, a pharmacy professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
A company that’s developing a novel way to treat wounds is the winner of the 2006 Wisconsin Governor’s Business Plan Contest.
The technology came from the lab of John Kao, a UW- Madison assistant professor of biomedical engineering.
In a deal that relieves the university and a private developer of more than $2.15 million in local property tax liability, the UW-Madison has taken ownership of “air space” in a new high-rise building that hasn’t been constructed.
The UW Board of Regents last month approved amending its agreement with Executive Management Inc., the Madison-based real estate firm redeveloping University Square into a $190 million mixed use complex.
MILWAUKEE – A state purchasing official testified at her fraud trial today that she contacted as many companies as she possibly could to give them a chance to win contracts to book travel by state employees.Georgia Thompson, Department of Administration purchasing supervisor, was the first witness called to testify today as her defense began trying to rebut prosecutors’ contention that she favored Adelman Travel Group for a contract because of pressure from her bosses and the company’s ties to Gov. Jim Doyle.
New jobs are opening up all the time in the dairy industry, and Chrissy Wendorf wants one of them.
She’ll be a junior this fall in the dairy science department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she’s part of a growing trend that finds women outnumbering men in what’s been traditionally a male-dominated field of study.
MILWAUKEE – A University of Wisconsin official was the first to suggest an extra step to evaluate the top two companies vying for a major state travel contract, she testified today at the trial of a state employee charged with rigging the contract process.
Lisa Clemmons, purchasing agent for the UW athletics department and a member of a committee that evaluated proposals for state travel contracts, said she, not Department of Administration official Georgia Thompson, was the first to suggest the committee solicit a best and final offer from Adelman Travel Group and Omega World Travel.
http://www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=432640
Story discusses Salus Discovery LLC, a biotech tool company that uses a patented technology with the potential to make it faster and cheaper to find new drugs. Salus’ technology was developed by a team led by David Beebe, a University of Wisconsin-Madison biomedical engineering professor, and is based on two patents licensed exclusively to the company by the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation.
MILWAUKEE – A travel consultant testified today he objected to a state purchasing official’s plan to add an additional step to the process used to award a major travel contract.
On the second day of Georgia Thompson’s trial on fraud charges, travel consultant Ian Thomas said he told Thompson in an e-mail he disagreed with the decision to pit Omega World Travel and Adelman Travel Group against each other in a tiebreaker after an initial evaluation showed Omega leading Adelman by 21 points on a 1,200-point scale.
A new pot of money is about to become available to promising young technology businesses in Madison and around the Midwest.
Venture Investors, a Madison venture capital firm, has closed on $69 million in commitments for its new fund, Venture Investors Early Stage Fund IV Limited Partnership.
http://www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=431170
Madison-based Venture Investors LLC will announce today that it has closed on $69 million in commitments for a new venture capital fund that will invest in very young companies in Wisconsin and the Midwest.
The fund – Venture Investors Early Stage Fund IV Limited Partnership – is the largest of its kind ever created in Wisconsin. It will help finance young companies formed around discoveries in the life sciences, engineering and information technology sectors.
The fund’s broad range of deep-pocketed investors includes the State of Wisconsin Investment Board, the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation and several big insurance companies and financial firms.
Howard Bremer, emeritus patent attorney with the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, was honored Friday with the 2006 Jefferson Award by the New Jersey Intellectual Property Law Association. Bremer, a pioneer in university technology transfer and intellectual property law, was also founder of the Association of University Technology Managers and helped champion the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980, giving universities and nonprofit groups the right to hold patents on their own inventions.
Adding green space to a downtown structure can be a challenge, but Executive Management Inc. found just the spot for it – on the roof.
A “green” roof that will provide a small park-like environment and catch rainwater is the newest design element of the company’s $190 million University Square project, which began construction today.
Madison, Wis. – Does the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation’s European stem cell patent application have a realistic chance for approval?
The foundation’s stem cell patent is controversial enough in the United States, where critics charge it is overly broad and is suppressing scientific research. While that is a contention WARF dismisses, pointing to the more than 300 academic licenses it has issued for stem cell research, the critics’ claims could influence Europe’s eventual decision.
When Joe Krupp left the family farm near Elkhart Lake in 1968 and headed to Madison for college, he never figured he’d one day be shaping the city.
Like many students at the University of Wisconsin at the time, Krupp had thoughts of somehow making the world a better place. He graduated in 1973 with a degree in social work.
But Krupp never pursued a career in that field. Instead, he took a summer construction job with friends and has called Madison home ever since.
The University Club certainly looks clubby and exclusive, with gables, gargoyles and ivy-choked brick walls on an imposing Tudor-style building.
But the University Club is hardly private. It’s open to all UW-Madison faculty and staff, giving them access to an affordable fine dining experience at lunch. Starting today, though, the door is thrown wide open. The public is welcome to enjoy this campus gem through the summer.
The lowest-paid workers in Wisconsin soon will have a little more change jingling in their pockets.
Today, the state’s minimum wage increased to $6.50 an hour, up from the $5.70 mark it reached a year ago. A state law signed by Gov. Jim Doyle on June 1, 2005, put the two-step increase in motion.
Hollywood, meet Milwaukee.
Starting in 2008, Wisconsin will have some of the nation’s most generous tax incentives for the film industry under a bill Gov. Jim Doyle signed on Tuesday. Supporters hope the array of tax credits for companies that produce films, television shows and video games in Wisconsin will jump-start an industry that is virtually nonexistent here.
As an assistant professor at UW-Madison, Denis Collins often railed against corporate abuses.
Quoted: Mark Schar, who serves on the board of the Center for Brand and Product Management at the University of Wisconsin School of Business.
Madison and Milwaukee’s Catholic bishops are challenging Gov. Jim Doyle’s support for embryonic stem cell research.
Archbishop Timothy Dolan of the Milwaukee Archdiocese and Bishop Robert Morlino of the Madison Diocese wrote to Doyle that they had “grave concerns” with his policy direction and asked him to rethink the matter.
Stringing a 345-kilovolt transmission line along the Beltline is a great idea or a bad idea, depending on whose back yard or barnyard the line cuts across.
Madison Mayor Dave Cieslewicz expressed “very grave concerns” about using the Beltline as an electrical conduit across Dane County, one of three routes introduced today by American Transmission Co. to a group of about 50 civic leaders from throughout the county.
First off, Terrence Wall wants to make a couple of things perfectly clear.
No, he didn’t become the largest commercial real estate developer in Dane County off the family money – although those connections certainly didn’t hurt. His father, John, is retired owner of DEMCO, the successful local library supply company.
Mentions that the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Business reports a 14.2% jump in companies interviewing on campus and a 6.2% raise in average salary for graduates – $47,021. UW Engineering Career Services says the average salary for engineers is up between 7% and 8%, with many new job seekers getting multiple offers, signing bonuses and relocation packages.
http://www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=425493
Mentions the winner of last year’s Governor’s Business Plan Contest: Madison-based Mithridion Inc., a company formed in late 2004 that is working on a drug developed at the University of Wisconsin-Madison that it hopes will either halt or slow the nerve damage associated with Alzheimer’s disease.
The public will be able to access on the Internet a list of companies competing for state contracts worth more than $10,000 under a new law.
Gov. Jim Doyle signed Thursday what’s become known as the “Contract Sunshine Act,” which says the Wisconsin Ethics Board must provide a list of companies competing for state business.
Are new high-voltage power lines needed in Dane County?
Before any new transmission line projects go forward, the County Board wants an independent study done to prove there’s a bona fide need for the lines and doesn’t want to just take the word of the American Transmission Co.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Business reports a 14.2% jump in companies interviewing on campus and a 6.2% raise in average salary for graduates – $47,021.
The biggest mixed-use development in Madison history will move forward – barely.
After members raised concerns and scrambled to find a solution, the City Council early Wednesday approved $3 million in public assistance for Executive Management Inc.’s 11- story, $190 million University Square project near UW- Madison.
A $150 million project to transform University Square has won last-minute financial support from the city of Madison.
On a 12-6 vote early this morning, the Madison City Council agreed to back the project – which includes one UW office tower and one private student housing tower, along with retail and parking – with $3 million in tax incremental financing.
Dane County Board supervisors have joined with energy expert Nino Amato in calling for an independent study to see if Dane County really needs the new high-voltage power lines proposed by the American Transmission Co.
Board Chair Scott McDonell, other supervisors and Amato called for the study today at a press conference downtown. ATC’s own study shows a need for increased capacity in Dane County, especially in the southern half of the county, to meet expected electrical demands.
…One of the possible three routes would use the Beltline corridor, affecting sensitive areas such as the E-9 environmental corridor, the UW Arboretum and Odana Hills Golf Course.
Mentor Corp. has begun clinical testing of another botulinum product stemming from a licensing agreement with the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation.
The Phase 1 safety and dose escalation study involves a botulinum toxin type A product focused on treating the pain associated with adult onset spasmodic torticollis/cervical dystonia.
The UW-Madison School of Business was ranked 14th in the U.S. and 28th in the world in the Financial Times’ annual list of executive education providers.
Last year, UW was rated 15th in the U.S. and 26th in the world. In 2004, UW was rated 17th in the U.S. and 32nd in the world. In 2003, UW was rated 17th in the U.S. and 34th in the world.
This graduation weekend is bittersweet. One of the legendary hangouts on the University of Wisconsin campus is leaving.
Paisan’s is moving to make way for a new University building project and after more than five decades on campus, it’ll close its doors Sunday.
The old boys network has some new competition.
A high-powered group of female investors aiming to put money into young, high-growth, women- and minority-owned or managed businesses in Wisconsin and the Midwest said Tuesday it has raised $2.3 million of capital commitments.
After years of incubating high-tech start-ups, the University Research Park on the west side of Madison is branching out into a new niche: young artists.
The park’s MGE Innovation Center on Thursday will hold its first-ever gallery night. Some 90 paintings and sculptures from 13 Masters of Fine Arts candidates at the University of Wisconsin-Madison will line the incubator’s walls and hallways.
….Rather than focusing on tax breaks or other incentives, regions looking to grow their economy need to be investing in education, basic services and those “quality of life” things that make a place attractive.
A first step for any community, however, is to realistically assess its strengths and weaknesses, says Barry Bluestone, director of the Center for Urban and Regional Planning at Northeastern University.
….Bluestone also cautioned against putting too much stock in the latest fad, specifically the biotechnology and nanotechnology bandwagon.
Bluestone also says states should create clusters of regional economic activity where people can meet, share ideas and foster a positive atmosphere. The University Research Park in Madison would seem to qualify on that account.
Ending a rash of bar-time beatings and robberies downtown has become priority No. 1 for downtown police as concern increases among residents, students and business owners.
Ald. Mike Verveer said the vicious attacks over the past several weeks, four of them last weekend alone, threaten the perception of safety in the downtown area.
Madison Gas and Electric Co.’s profits jumped 40 percent in the first three months of 2006, thanks to its new power plant on the UW-Madison campus and another plant under construction near Milwaukee, the company reported Monday.
Ah, the magic of film.
Shoot Wisconsin from the right angle, and it can look like a farm community in New England, a bustling Midwest college campus, big-city mean streets or a remote windswept beach.
Old buildings? Got ’em. Jam-packed sports arena? Of course.
(Incentives approved by the legislature last week include use of state-owned buildings and locations free of charge as available.)
It probably wasn’t until the threat of losing e-mail service through the popular, handheld BlackBerry devices sent a shudder through the nation that most people were even aware of a growing trend: small companies, often with only a handful of employees, taking on the tech giants in big-bucks patent lawsuits.
Milwaukee and Madison fell 38 places and 21 places, respectively, in Forbes’ eighth annual “Best Places for Business and Careers Survey,” which ranks the 200 largest U.S. metro areas based on economic conditions and quality of life factors.
Increases in the cost of doing business and the cost of living, combined with declines in income growth and job growth, contributed to Milwaukee’s fall to No. 124 from No. 86 a year ago. Those same areas caused Madison to skid to No. 31 from No. 10 a year ago.
Quoted: James LaGro, chair of the department of urban and regional planning at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
While extensive summer construction may bring headaches to those staying in Madison, when University of Wisconsin students return to campus and downtown areas this fall, they will notice many changes.
Researchers from across the state have received their first formal invitation to submit ideas that will formulate collaborative biological and medical research at Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery.
UW-Madison unveiled details of a competitive seed grant program Monday that will initially provide $3 million in funding for research at the $375 million facility expected to open in 2009.
“It is critical that these projects begin soon so that research is well under way when we are ready to move into this world-class facility,” said UW-Madison graduate school Dean Martin Cadwallader in a statement.
A month ago, Chancellor John Wiley announced a total of $100 million in donations toward the construction of an on-campus biomedical research complex. And now the University of Wisconsin is asking its scientists and researchers what they want to do with it.
Organizers of the planned $375 million Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery in Madison said Monday that they are looking for researchers from around the state to compete in a new seed grant program.
Compare the thinking and priorities of a university research professor and someone at an international financial firm, and they likely won’t be too similar.
This week at UW-Madison, however, representatives of academic, financial and business organizations from around the world connected in meetings and discussions about a computer program they all use. Users of the program from companies that included JP Morgan, Yahoo!, Micron Technologies and United Bank of Switzerland participated.
Scott Ruttencutter, 26, opened his Web design business last spring at his home in Windsor.
“I had people at my house all hours of the day, for about eight months,” he said, with a smile.
Today, Ruttencutter’s IQ Foundry has four employees and offices at Common Wealth Development’s Madison Enterprise Center, 100 S. Baldwin St. It has made money from the get-go, Ruttencutter said, and he expects to reach $1 million to $2 million a year in revenue, with a staff of 10, in a year or two.
A public forum addressing the role of postsecondary education in Wisconsin�s economy brought noted experts in the field, business leaders and University of Wisconsin System chancellors to the Pyle Center Thursday.
This is a Madison boomerang story. Times two.
Dan Olszewski is back in the state capital, for the second time. This time around, the Harvard MBA is heading the Weinert Center for Entrepreneurship at the UW-Madison School of Business.
He replaced Larry Cox, who took a job last year at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana.
Mayor Dave Cieslewicz today pledged to fight against a high-voltage power line through the south side of the city.
He also said he will find more ways to band together with other cities to reach regional solutions that higher levels of government haven’t addressed.
In the mayor’s “State of the City” speech he was to deliver today to the Madison Downtown Rotary Club, Cieslewicz also plugged his idea for a local rail system of electric streetcars, calling diesel commuter rail “not a good fit for our city or region.”
Gov. Jim Doyle signed an executive order Tuesday directing the state Department of Commerce to spend at least $5 million over an indefinite period of time to encourage more stem cell companies in Wisconsin.
In a darkly hilarious scene from the 1975 comedy “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” a collector of dead bodies wheeled his cart through a plague- ravaged medieval neighborhood. As he stopped to pick up another body, he was startled to hear the words “I’m not dead.”
He had encountered “the dead body that claims it isn’t.”
Something similar is taking place at the state Capitol with another “dead body that claims it isn’t.” But this time no one is laughing.
Although manufacturing and farming quickly come to mind whenever one thinks of Wisconsin exports, some of the state’s most valuable products are its advances in life sciences.
The state must do a much better job of harnessing that scientific capital for its own economic well-being and future prosperity. These issues were outlined in a series of articles this week by Journal Sentinel reporters Kathleen Gallagher and Susanne Rust.
Richard Meese, a UW-Madison graduate who is an economist and expert on foreign currency exchange rates, has given $1 million to to establish a professorship in applied econometrics at the UW.
“The university laid the foundation for my work success,” Meese, who manages research and strategy on global currency products for Barclays Global Investors and is a former economics professor at the University of California-Berkeley, said in a statement.
The faltering effort by the hard-core right in Wisconsin to put a constitutional cap on local government spending – ala Colorado’s TABOR – is rooted in the idea the state has too many lazy, entrenched, overpaid public employees.
Of course, few Republicans, including gubernatorial candidate Mark Green, have the guts to actually come out and say it that way. Instead, they talk about the need for government to “live within its means” just like all the “hard-working families” in Wisconsin, which we assume means white, suburban, SUV-driving GOP voters, who also own a small business.
But if you read between the lines or listen to the AM radio hate-jocks, it always comes back to the same blame game: too many liberal teachers, too many shovel-leaning streets workers, too many pencil-pushing bureaucrats.
Susan Armacost and Ed Fallone are passionate about the morality of human embryonic stem cell research. They are also worlds apart.
Armacost, legislative director of Wisconsin Right to Life, says the destruction of embryos necessary to obtain the cells is murder. Her organization has added embryonic stem cell research to its traditional issues of abortion, euthanasia and assisted suicide.
Fallone, president of Wisconsin Stem Cell Now Inc., says it’s wrong to put limits on research that many believe has the potential to cure diseases, including the juvenile diabetes that afflicts him, his father and his son. He formed his group to advocate for stem cell research in the state after President Bush was re-elected.
Although the long-term future of human embryonic stem cell research in Wisconsin depends on a political consensus, the issue does not fit neatly within the lines of Republican or Democratic, conservative or liberal.
It’s financial crunch time for Executive Management Inc.’s proposed $190 million University Square project near UW-Madison and two other big Madison projects.
The three developments — University Square, McGrath & Associates’ Union Corners on the East Side and Mortenson Investment Group’s Landmark Gate on the South Side — are seeking a total $10.9 million public aid from the city.
A yogurt-granola-and-fruit tart that won a national product development competition last summer could be the start of a business. At least, that’s what its creators are hoping.
The tart – centerpiece of the company, Healthy sTarts – was the most mouth-watering of the products and prototypes on display at UW-Madison’s Grainger Hall on Friday for the annual Burrill Technology Business Plan Competition.
And it came up a winner again, grabbing the $7,000 second-place prize.
Madison – A young company with a preventive solution to identity theft took home the $10,000 top prize in the 2006 G. Steven Burrill Technology Business Plan Competition, but if area investors want to keep this promising enterprise close to home, they better act quickly.
